


Jate’kara

by krissology



Series: Jate’kara [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: F/M, Planet Concordia (Star Wars), Planet Mandalore (Star Wars), The Mandalorian (TV) References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:23:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28752123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krissology/pseuds/krissology
Summary: (Young Din Djarin x Young Mandalorian Fem!Reader)These events are a prequel to The Mandalorian. Growing up together on Concordia and training in the way of the Mandalore, yourself and Din Djarin find your destiny in each other.
Relationships: Din Djarin & You, Din Djarin/Reader
Series: Jate’kara [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2107902
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Kad Ha’rangir - Ancient Mandalorian Deity

You were taught that from the surface of Mandalore on a clear night, this Concordian moon lit up the sky in toxic green like a beacon. A strobe of what was festering and growing strong and deadly in the open air of space. Welding impenetrable armor from the natural silt of the ground, raising young malleable children into unstoppable warriors, everything on this moon was built for war, built for death.  
Even so, with its sullen anecdotes Concordia was aesthetically exquisite. Flowing mountain ranges that melted into the deep blues of the sky, disappearing through winding fog and showing back up again to kiss the edge of unforgiving, neverending thick brushes of forest. The native Torrent Wisp trees bending and leaning to litter every sinuous hidden path and groove of terrain.  
Before the war on Mandalore ended, anarchists had torn and prodded into the bounteous soil on Concordia. Cultivating ghastly ruinous mines in search of beskar below the moon’s surface. The result being terrifying deforestation, broken ecosystems, scorched earth. Thin smog danced low on the forest floors even years after Mandalorian warriors dropped down onto it. While the pirating had largely ceased, it wasn’t uncommon for a lone looter or two to take their chances in an old abandoned mine; looking to farm any remaining semblance of beskar steel to sell through the underground market.  
\--  
Where was he? Your vambrace lit up, blinking orange, angry, ready for a fight. Stealth was learned and mastered at an early age in your training. You had the ability to silence, hell, even completely stop your breathing for minutes at a time during a hunt. There were ways to make the sound of your becalmed footfall blend into the natural rise and fall of your surroundings that only trained ears would pick up on. Ways to manipulate the scuttle of rocks and leaves to keep you several steps ahead of an enemy. Your chest rose and fell in tandem with your steps as you moved through thickets of brush and still drying mud. You may be able to quiet your movements, but there was no hiding the intense thump behind your ribcage that drowned out even the hypersensitive hearing of your helmet.  
Your visor surged to life to scan the ground for heat imprints, little clues he may have left, mistakes he rarely, but under stress, could have made. A small wisping wind sent a weaseling bird into flight to the left of you, but you knew better than to follow that distraction as it ascended into the air. He was waiting for your guard to drop, for the focus in your body language to waiver. Being raised Mandalorian - faceless, anonymous, you learn to convey your emotions through the subtle waves of your body. The way your fingers twitch when you feel combatted, the shrouded bobbing of your cloaked neck when you’re nervous, the way you drop your shoulders an extra inch when exhaustion spars with your mind. He knew you, like this. Knew the argot of your hips. Spent hours studying it, remembering it. Knew the translations of every tilt of your head, the emotion of every singular breath running its course through your chest. Knew as he watched you, right now, dawdling around the base of a torrent trunk, that with the quick shine of sunlight beaming off your vambrace and blinding him momentarily, he’d been found out.  
“Come out Djarin, you ogled for too long,” you teased, waiting dauntlessly for the other boot to drop. Even if you had managed to narrow his location, there was still a fight to come.  
A branch cracked not even five metres away, a millisecond before two solid thuds hit the ground behind you. “Well,” he started, gripping the pauldron on your left shoulder and sweeping a knee out from under you. You hit the ground with full force, air rushing out of your lungs as your vision struggled to refocus. Above you a bobblehead of beskar was bent over, hands on his hips and staring through your visor, “you cheated.”  
A wicked saccharine smile spread across your face beneath the helmet, just before the trilling sound of your fire shooter beamed to life. You let out a short laugh as your pursuer lept several paces away to avoid the roaring flames that took his place. You sprung up onto your feet from your back effortlessly, finding him with his closed fists raised to fight. You beckoned him with an open palm, your fingers curling in a taunting ‘come here’ motion, he obliged immediately, throwing a calculated punch toward your rib cage that you blocked, and then another toward your helmet. You reacted to his arm, grabbing his bicep with both hands, and turning your body to flip him over your shoulder. You rolled with him, ending him down flat on his back and straddled with a vibroblade to the underside of his chin. “C’mon Din, you know me better than that.”  
“Yeah,” he sighed, his gentle hands resting on the rounds of your thighs as they fell to either side of his hips, fingers squeezing so lightly as if to say ‘I surrender, you win, now I’m just enjoying the view.’ You felt your guard drop instantaneously when his heavy palms splayed out further, stopping your breathing as they found the thick flesh of your ass beneath your flight suit. You pushed back into his hands, tempting him further, rolling your hips so slowly against the apex of his thighs that if he hadn’t been so hyper aware of your every move in that moment he may have missed it. He squeezed you there, testing the water, asking permission in his own desperate and inexperienced way. You didn’t stop him. “Yeah,” he repeated, “I do.” Just before sending you careening over his head and onto the hard, dirty forest floor.  
The hot heat of embarrassment flushed your cheeks when you hit the ground. The actual nerve of him. That sly, arrogant, shebs’palon, asshole. “You shiny, son of a bitch,” you spewed, finding your footing as quick as you could, but not quick enough because there he was in all his helmeted glory when you turned around, blaster in hand and pointed at you. “That was a cheap shot,” you said, fumbling backwards as he stalked toward you, “even for you.” You felt your back hit a curving Torrent Wisp tree trunk with a faint ting of armor as Din closed the distance between the two of you, pressing his blaster barrel into your side. “And you wonder why I always have to cheat.”  
He let his knee take up space between your thighs, his left forearm resting against the gray bark next to your head, crowding you so tightly between himself and the tree that the air around you seemed to disperse, there was simply no room for it, no room to breath, nowhere to escape. “You talk way too much,” he jibed, letting the stark blackness of his visor pour into yours, twisting the blaster against your rib cage as if to remind you that it was still there. “Surrender, and we don’t have to play this game anymore.”  
You chuckled, wiggling your side away from him playfully. Noting your defiance, he shifted his thigh against the heat between your legs and your spine stiffened, the chuckle becoming a shuddering breath. Then there was silence so loud it could pierce ears. Just you and Din, pressed into the shade of this green canopy, testing each other's resolve like you had so many times before this. Who could stay away longer, who could push harder, who was going to be the first to break. “Fine,” you finally submitted, “Only because, I know how much you’d love for me to stroke your big, fat…. ego.” He tossed his blaster to the side, quickly caging your head between both forearms now, nearly touching your helmet to his own. “I knew you’d catch me.” you admitted.  
“I always do.”  
\--  
You met Din Djarin in 19 BBY. Two snotting ten year olds among hundreds being fitted with a beskar dome piece and little to no instruction manual on how to properly execute “The Way.” Both of your home planets devastated by galactic war your families had staked no claim in. Thank kriff, looking back now, that the Mandalorians were there to salvage the freshly orphaned children. To save them. Maybe it cost you your identity, but hey, at least you were alive. Alive and standing in several straight lines among the other foundlings, swearing a creed in a foreign language.  
You nudged the brand new mando next to you, “A mandalorian never removes their helmet in front of others, this is the way,” You giggled, reciting the words in a mocking tone. “I mean we’re really never allowed to? Not even for like… eating?”  
He shook his head, fixing you a look you’d come to learn as ‘Din’s head tilt of disapproval’ as years passed on. “Shhh,” he whispered, “you’re gonna get us in trouble.” Straightening back up, he listened to the captain, the alor’ad, declaim the creed in its entirety.  
A few minutes later you leaned back over, attention span be damned, and nudged him again. “Did your parents,” you gestured at him with your hand, “you know, are they..” he slowly turned his neck to eye you again, waiting for you to finish your thought. “Are your parents, um..” you raised your hand to make a slicing motion from ear to ear across your neck.  
He held your stare so long without speaking you started questioning his intelligence, it wasn’t until you moved to divert your gaze that he let out a terse, “yeah,” in return. You nodded along to his confession. Not sure what else to do to express your solidarity without the use of facial expression, you gave him a lazy thumbs up and said “me too.”  
He huffed out a short laugh, in disbelief as much as shame for finding a silver lining in the hell of his life over the span of a few short weeks. Here he stood, on a foreign moon, next to a faceless girl who can’t seem to shut up, making him crack an, albeit broken, authentic smile behind the beskar over his dead parents.  
“Where did you used to live?” you whispered again, testing how far you could push your new friend with the drone of the captain explaining training and schooling in the background.  
“Aq Vetina.”  
“Wow! Me too, it’s a wonder how we’ve never-”  
“You talk too much.”  
Even as time moved on and you both grew into your lanky awkwardness, Din more so than you, the song remained the same. You would make a scene at inopportune times and he’d play mediator, de-escalator, grown up. He took his training as a Mandalorian seriously, and as hard as he tried and you didn’t exactly, you were still just as good as he was and at times even better. He could run circles around you in hand to hand combat, but you were stealthier. He had completed and passed testing in an entire arsenal of weapons before you, but you were still quicker on the trigger. He spoke three different languages before you both turned sixteen, but you were the one able to talk yourself out of nearly everything that got you in hot water with your elders. He should have loathed you, steered clear of you, formed any other type of bond with another foundling, but he couldn’t. He was like a moth to a flame, incapable of seeing the way you would burn him to his core and leave him black and crippled before he even got the chance to truly touch you.  
\--  
Assembled much like every other training course you’d been through, in straight and even lines and partnered with another foundling, Alor’ad had ushered you all to the peak of a sprawling Concordian mountain. High enough that the treelines disappeared beneath a thick sheen of cloud coverage, the only true measurement of altitude was when every so often a Shriek-Hawk would puncture the lining with its prey in mouth, meaning you’d surmounted at least 4,000 meters. Din and yourself shared glances, as one by one the lot of you practiced lifting off the ground by jetpack and diving into the thick misty brume, disappearing below.  
Instead of your usual loquaciousness, you remained stoic. Counting the number of helmets still in front of you, testing the theories of jetpack failure you’d studied in texts, wondering where the hypothetical bathroom would be on the edge of this demon’s forsaken mountain top if you had to ‘slip away’ for a moment. Actually, where were you supposed to go to the bathroom? They couldn’t actually expect you to jump off a cliff into the unknown with a full bladder. Are you supposed to take the jetpack off when you pee?  
“Scared of heights?” His voice took you out of your own thoughts.  
You huffed, crossing your arms combatively over your chestplate. Nope. No way. You would not give him this petty victory over you. Lately your interactions had been… charged, you could say. Little ways his voice had changed rang different in your earpiece, and he was taller, so much taller all of a sudden, and everything had gotten more competitive between the two of you. God it was so childish, you needed to constantly out-do him, embarrass him even, as long as he was giving you his attention. The worst was that you just couldn’t shake the need to touch him. Nudging him with an elbow before you walked away, pretending to be intrigued by a new scuff on his cuirass so you could run a hand down his arm, holding onto him by the meat of his sides to make sure he ‘securely’ put his jetpack on…  
“Me?” If he could see your face, your eyebrows were damn near touching your hairline at his implication. “I’m not scared of anything,” you turned away from him with hostility. “Not even death.”  
He mirrored you, turning back to step up onto the cliff’s face as your impending departure from the atmosphere became apparent. “After you, then.” He chided, gesturing a hand out like he was opening the door to a glimmering chariot.  
“Always a gentleman,” you remarked, sighing silently into your vocoder before closing the gap between yourself and your periphery. You felt your jetpack jolt alive on your back.  
“Just like riding a speeder-bike,” you heard Din rasp from behind you, obviously enjoying the scene before him. Taking in the way your shoulders clamped up into your neck when you dared a look below, how your fingers were balled into your little, but very capable fists, the tight material of your tactical pants leaving none to his imagination.  
“I’ve never ridden a fucking speeder bike,” you growled, before leaping into the void.  
It took several seconds of panic before you realized that despite the prospect of doom surrounding you, the fall was peaceful. The vast nothingness was a welcome wave. Four thousand meters was a long way to the ground and yet you wished it less and less ephemeral as the moments passed. You were afraid to take the leap but once the fog cleared and the apprehension dissipated, there was nothing left but you and your thoughts and the wind whipping around you. This, this is what you must have been craving. The limbo between life and death, the adrenaline of chancing everything for a thrill, the overwhelming desire to feel invincible, otherworldly. The way of the Mandalore was absolute, no room for mistakes, no learning experiences, definitely no try-fails. Creed was life. Yet, ambivalence marred your every waking thought. Why were you training for a war you were sure you’d never have to fight? You were taught from an early age Mandalore was cursed, desolate and inhabitable; the people there living within bio-domes to stay alive. While the moon of Concordia was a fortress, protection from even one tribe of Mandalorians would suffice through any attack.  
The pride of being Mandalorian weighed on your selfishness to be human. To feel things, things other than the cold density of beskar that had become your second skin. You wanted to know the sound of another voice unhindered by static, the thoughts of another person without the undertone of warfare, the fucking touch of someone on your body besides your own. Family was such a core value of the Mandalorians but how? When were they going to teach that premise. You were naive, sure, but all the foundlings at one time or another had whispered about the intimate ways you become round with a child.  
Din had sat there on the floor next to you, feigning disinterest while he cleaned a blaster, as the others shared unfledged sexual experiences. How a woman gets so wet when she’s turned on that a man can just slip right into her body. How they feel like warm velvet on the inside, and when they climax they squeeze a man so tightly that Kad Ha’rangir, appears to tell him to fill her with his seed. He thanked every God he had ever read about that night for the mask he was forced to wear, fidgeting beneath his woolen blanket to relieve himself. He couldn’t stop thinking about you, the way you reacted to their every word, stoic but intrigued. Your helmet tilting ever so slightly with each new shred of information. The way your legs crossed, pressed together knee over knee, after you stole a blistering glance at him.  
\--  
You hadn’t been on the ground more than two minutes when his jetpack sputtered from above and he landed clumsily beside you. You’d tucked yourself away on a far ledge of the mountain where if you looked one way you could see the dim lights of your dwellings in the little city, and in the other direction, sprawling grey and purple river valley kissing the horizon of the setting sun. The skeletons of beskar mines peppered the middleground, like little black boxes swallowed by a landscape.  
“I’m surprised to find you in one piece,” he nudged, plopping down next to you on the rock face.  
“Mir’sheb,” smartass, you huffed, shoving him with your shoulder and pulling a chuckle from the depths of his vocoder.  
“It doesn’t shock me that you could barely pass language training, yet managed to remember every way to insult someone in Mando’a,” he teased.  
“Yeah well, you give me lots of practice,” you followed his sight to find him focused below at the flowing current of water, watching the pinks and oranges of dusk dance on it. “It’s not as beautiful as home,” you said.  
He pondered for a second, rubbing his palms along his thighs and knees, scratching at a long forgotten slice through the deep red of his armor. His losses never faded from him, not like yours. Your uprooting from Aq Vetina was like an injury that healed. You functioned just the same but there was a part of you not as strong as the rest. Every so often you’d be reminded of your injury, but it was fleeting, like a joint aching on a day it’s supposed to rain. The next day the sun would come out and the pain would be all but forgotten. For Din, those losses lived inside him like a virus. Taking up residency in his brain, fatiguing his decisions, spreading so deeply into his bones that he was sure there would never be a minute of his life unshrouded by the shadow of his life before the Mandalorians. But he owed everything to this creed.  
“It is home,” he said.  
You sighed, surveying as the sun dipped below the green outline of the moon’s hem. Wanting nothing more than to pull him out of his own deep reflection beside you, you slapped his thigh and gave it a squeeze. “Wanna hear something funny?” You turned to face him and he mirrored you.  
“As long as you can promise me that having this knowledge won’t get me put on privy duty for a week.”  
Your shoulders startling rattling as you failed to contain a laugh. “I didn’t land here purposely,” you pointed up and to your right at a patch of scorched and leafless branches on a tree above you. Lost in your own free-falling bliss you had misjudged the amount of focus it would take to flip upright when you finally did decide to land, and instead, you found yourself careening into the arboreal summit.  
He looked up in disbelief, taking in the still smoking bark and tiny kindling of bright orange flame hanging onto the tree by a thread. He shook his head before fixing his gaze back on you and spit-laughing into the confines of his helmet. “Here I thought you were just a sucker for a nice view.”  
“You literally followed me to what could have been my death,” you joked.  
“Well for what it’s worth I’m glad you didn’t die,” he pinched the flesh under your rib-cage playfully, “I don’t know what I’d do with all the peace and quiet.”  
You shoved his helmet with your palm, smiling behind your beskar like you were a little girl again. You wanted like hell for this little moment to remain, to pause in space for a little while longer, and it did, with the heavy weight of silence crushing both of your chests. So much left unsaid in those long pauses, so many thoughts blitzing through the open air. How many years had it been? Nine now, co-existing, learning, growing together. Every decision the two of you had made since arriving on Concordia, led you to the edge of a mountain, sitting now blanketed in deep purple dusk because neither of you could figure out how to make the next damn move.  
“I’m serious,” he started, his visor burning into your own, you hadn’t noticed the placement of his hand until then, the way his left arm was crossed behind your back, gloved palm splayed out on the rock inches from your hip. “I like being around you. Talking to you.”  
Maybe it was fight or flight kicking in but despite the growing thump in your chest and the splintering goosebumps rising on your skin, you couldn’t help but ruin everything. Couldn’t keep yourself from self-sabotage. He was making this so easy for the both of you, so direct. It was just like Din to just tell you his feelings, no bullshit, no dancing around it longer than he needed to. He was just so confident you felt the same. How could you not, he was everything. Fierce warrior, loyal friend, tranquil, level headed, so fucking smart, unbearably attractive without even having a face, for crying out loud. You wouldn’t make this easy for him too, he had to at least try to win you.  
“Is this your big plan, Djarin?” you tested, “Seeing if your lines work on me, so you can go try to get laid?”  
He sat up straighter, pulling his hand from behind you in the same breath. “No it’s not -”  
“Come on, you’re an eighteen year old virgin, you’d probably pay for some ass at this point.”  
“Kinda hoped it wouldn’t come to that,” he combatted, feeling his confidence struck down ever further as the seconds dragged on.  
‘Right,” you scoffed, crossing your arms over your chest, “well I’m not a stepping stone, so if you were hoping to get some practice in, I’d try another girl.” You turned away from him, picking violently at a stray rock lodged into the sole of your boot until it broke free, then tossing it over the cliff’s edge.  
“There’s no other girl,” he offered again, pulling your hand away from its assault on your shoe and closing your fingers into his palm. “Just you.”  
You stared at him a moment too long, processing, fantasizing, trying to convince yourself you deserved to have this. To have something that penetrated the beskar, something human. You must have been lost in thought for longer than you realized because there he was to pull you back out of it.  
“I know you, and I know your guard is up and you’re sitting here just thinking of ways to avoid this,” he grabbed you lightly by both your arms as if to steer your focus. “I can learn to survive if you don’t want me, I’ll admit I read this wrong in thinking that you felt the same.”  
Your resolve had vanished. You watched as pieces of the shattered wall you built between yourself and Din splintered into the dirt, because you did want him. Holy fuck did you want him, and that was the problem. This unattainable high you were trying to chase, the high that you found in the free-fall was sitting in front of you and you knew as soon as you got a hit you’d crave more. On the other side of this ledge was a long way down, but the feeling of flying… well that was worth whatever lay at the bottom.  
You pulled his hands into yours, and heard the weight of a heavy sigh leave his body. “You aren’t wrong” you said, rubbing your thumbs over his, “I just don’t want to let myself have this, because I’m too indulgent. I’m too reckless.”  
“We already knew that,” he murmured, pulling a quiet laugh from you.  
“Sometimes I feel… guilty, in a way” you started, “because I want all these things we can’t have under our creed.” The sun had long set by then, the purpling sky a rich deep blue, the only faint light being the toxic green ring around the moon. “I want to know what you look like under there.” You scraped a thumb across the cheek of his helmet. “And I want to hear your voice without that stupid fucking vocoder,” you added, shaking your head, “I don’t deserve to be a Mandalorian when my mind is full of trivial things.”  
He tilted his helmet in understanding, listening to your every thought, keeping it close to him as he felt the same way about the menial things he’d never experience in life. One sticking out more than the rest. “What other things do you want?” he asked, voice lower and softer than before.  
A breath, a pause before the leap into the unknown below. “I want to kiss you,” you whispered, “I really want to fucking kiss you.”  
Another breath, a pause. “In another life,” he said, leaning his helmet into yours, you met him halfway with a soft metallic clink. “I’ll kiss you until your lips are bruised.”  
“In another life.”  
\--  
In the weeks that past on, it was a smoldering heat. The ways in which you invaded each other’s every thought was insurmountable. Avoiding your tribes to spend time just taking up one another’s space. Stolen glances, lingering touches, the unbelievable need to just simply be near each other. How did you even have the room for all these feelings inside your body before this? Where had they been hiding all this time you spent waiting for him? Waiting for Din.  
It was common for foundlings to train amongst themselves between lessons, honing and sharpening skills for testing, often giving chase to one another like bounties through the dense landscapes that Concordia provided. Which is how you had ended up here, pressed against the trunk of this Torrent Wisp Tree, caged into Din’s arms like prey, forced to surrender with a blaster to your side. Lust radiated in every shallow fighting breath as Din’s armored thigh pressed tightly into your core. All the tension in the weeks since you confessed your feelings to one another, the build up, the teasing, was floating like a force in this moment.  
“What happens now?” You whispered.  
Din laced his fingers with yours, pulling you to follow him down the jutted path through the woods.  
“Come on.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You and Din give in to one another for the first time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explicit depictions of sex. Loss of virginity.

You would follow him anywhere. It’s stupid, so stupid, but you would legitimately follow this man into a sarlaac pit. Into the cold arctic abyss of an icy tundra, into the depths of a spewing, snarling lava tunnel. You would wrap your fingers impossibly tight around his own and leap from the peak of the highest Concordian mountain, sans jetpack, as long as it was guaranteed you would die in his arms. Stars, this was really happening. It could have been called possession, the way your footsteps fell in line behind his as you toiled through the warping bends of the forest. Following his every move as if he would disappear if you looked away for just a second. You found your eyes trained on the way his body moved under the armour. The kneading of muscle against the tight material cinching his waist, the sway of his shoulders, the thick husk of his thighs everytime he took a step.  
It was an unsung song, the way you both knew where this slow hike was leading. Wherever he was taking you, was the abrupt end of years of soft touches and coquettish conversation. It was the end of ‘who am I without you?’ because that would never be the case again. Din reached back with a gloved hand, asking for your own as if he too, needed to make sure you wouldn’t just disappear if he didn’t keep you close enough. You knew, you both knew, that the end of this trek would be something you could never come back from, undo, re-do, re-live even if you wished it a thousand times. He was going to fuck you. Make love to you, give his body to you, and you to him. Your fist was trembling in his palm and he squeezed it tighter when the path you were on flanked into an opening with the ugly face of an abandoned beskar mine staring at you. You let out a breath you couldn’t tell how long you’d been holding, stopping next to Din before the open mouth of the mine started a decline deep into the roots of the moon’s earth.  
“I would never do anything to you, that you didn’t want me to,” Din said, leaning in to tap the hard shelled forehead of his helmet against your own, “and, everything that you want me to do to you, is yours.”  
\--  
It was the soft crunch of soot underneath your boots that kept you from losing yourself completely in the dim of the mine. That, and Din tethering you to the earth with his vice grip on your wrist, because if not for him you’re sure you would have floated away. The metallic of the walls faded and meshed into harsh gray rock the further you walked ahead. It was only the faint glow of orange light from the setting sun bleeding through the mouth of the cave that kept you exposed. Packing pallets of wooden crates lined the walls, stacked and stranded. No one would ever find you here, not in a million millenia. The vast nothingness that was the landscape on Concordia where these mines were first constructed was just that, nothing. Unusable, unhideable, unbothered by anyone for years. Not since before the Mandalorian civil wars. He had led you to a place he knew would be secluded. More than secluded, private and sheltered, and entirely yours. Not a place the other foundlings may have come before to have sex, or escaped to when the elders weren’t keeping track of them. A place that he knew would be significant, personal, safe.  
Then, it was as if the space was whispering, coaxing, here, this is the place. That or you both came to terms that you couldn’t walk down this ramp forever. You couldn’t run from the feeling forever, the tension forever. Maker, the both of you were fighting an internal battle that started and ended with, I want you. Now, how do we get there?  
Your breath hitched when he abruptly lifted you to sit atop a crate. Folding himself into the space between your legs so your helmets were level. Your hands came to rest on top of his pauldrons, connecting your head with his once more and doing absolutely nothing to hide the shallow uneven tempo of your breathing.  
“Is this where you kill me?” you whispered, “I already surrendered.”  
He ran his palms along the lengths of your thighs, slowly, softly up and down the outer edges of the beskar plates protecting your quads. The simple gesture reminding you so heavily of the ache you harbored when it came to Din. The low pang in your abdomen that never truly went away while you were around him, now ignited and threatening.  
“There’s been plenty of times since I met you that I’ve wanted to kill you,” he whispered in return, “I can’t say that’s what’s on my mind right now.”  
“Hm,” you hummed, letting your palms trail down the front of his chestplate to settle at his beltline. You felt high on the rapid confidence his hands provided as they glided from knee to waist, his fingers curling to draw patterns in the meat of your hips through the thin material of your cargos. Then he stopped all together, instead bringing his hands up to hold your helmet still against his own, and you could have sworn you saw him through the beskar in that moment.  
“Rejorhaa'ir’ni gar ruusaanyc’ni.” Tell me you trust me. He muttered, letting his gloved fingers drop to your shoulders, pressing his thumbs beneath the pauldrons.  
“Ganar’ni ruusaanyc o’r gar,” I trust you, you answered, watching as Din shed your armour from your shoulders and moved to the plates across your chest. Your resolve was rapidly declining, and the only thing to keep you grounded was returning this gesture to him, sliding his beskar from his limbs in the same fashion as he did yours, slow at first and then rashly. Like a race of who was going to get to their prize first. Always a competition with him.  
“Rejorhaa'ir’ni gar kar’tayl mav’ni cabuor gar, darasuum,” Tell me you know I’ll always protect you. He discarded your chest plate, your vambraces, your gloves, and held your bare hands to his own beskar ridded chest, and for the first time you felt the warmth of his skin radiating beneath your fingertips, even if it was through the durable cloth of his shirt.  
“Ni kar’tayl,” I know, you assured him, sliding his gloves from his palms to join the growing pile of discarded items on the ground matching yours. Knee shields, thigh pieces, your boots kicked off and strewn in completely different directions.  
Parts of you have ached for him for years now. Before you even knew what the feeling meant. The wings of a butterfly inside of you when you were only 14 years old, watching him score highest in your class with an ambien rifle. The shameful heat at the back of your neck the first time you pictured him stark nude, wondering if he ever had the same deplorable thoughts about you.  
Din teased his fingers at the hem of your tunic, flirting with the skin and making every last tiny hair on your body stand on edge. You expected your own reaction to be the most profound of the two of you but the soft way your stomach felt against his fingertips made Din forget his own name. He had hardly touched you and he was trembling at the prospect of having more. Having more of you in his grip, beneath him, clenched around him. His short shuddery exhale shouldn’t have calmed you, but it did. You were both in a place of inexperience. Both of you so used to knowing everything, being trained in everything. This, this was not that. This was teaching yourselves how to dance without music. You pulled at the hem of his shirt in tandem, as if to tell him he didn’t have to do this himself, he didn’t have to give you everything with nothing in return.  
“Rejorhaa'ir’ni copaanir’gar ni as ibic,” Tell me you want me like this, he mumbled, hands ghosting the skin of your sides as your shirt was gently lifted to rest at your rib cage, awaiting an answer.  
“Copaanir’ni gar, Din. Darasuum.” I want you, Din. Always.”  
Just as quickly as you spoke the words your chest became bare. Nothing between the two of you to keep you decent. He had seen you now, seen you exposed and there was no going back from that, this was something that would be burnt into his brain for the rest of his life. The supple swell of your breasts rising and falling erratically above your diaphragm because you couldn’t calm down. Couldn’t control your breathing, couldn’t keep the peppered goose bumps from rising on your skin and telling all your secrets. Your budding nipples hard at attention, pebbled and blushing for him, asking for him.  
He couldn’t have dreamed you this beautiful. Not in all the times he had imagined you like this, envisioned it, touched himself over it, were you this ethereal. Din had been hard from the second you entered the mine. Call it inexperience, lust, flagrant male libido, but now it was something beyond that. He was vibrating with hunger and adrenaline and it encompassed him so much so he found his body frozen in place. What do I do? Which way do I move? How could I ever treat her body the way it deserves?  
“S-say something, Din,” you quipped, shuddering under his gaze. Maker, why was he so quiet, what was wrong, were you nothing like he imagined? Was he regretting this so fully he couldn’t even move, right now? Just stuck in his boots like a fucking scrag. “If you don’t like what you see just spit it out, Djarin.” You moved to cross your arms over your breasts in embarrassment, maybe even defiance but his balmy hands caught you by the biceps and smoothed them back down to your sides.  
“How could you say that,” he mumbled, sliding both palms under your breasts, cupping them tenderly in his grasp. “Don’t like what I see?”  
You tilted your helmet down to watch him, kneading you with his fingers, running his thumbs over the peak of your nipples and reveling in the taut pebbled skin. He abandoned one of your breasts to snatch your wrist, guiding it down to harshly press against the thick length of him swollen behind the seam of his pants. “Does this answer your question?”  
Oh.  
“Yeah, y-yup, it definitely does–answer that.” You were stringing half thought out sentences together to keep yourself grounded but the feel of him in your palm, hard as the beskar he wore and big. Impossibly—big. No seriously how was he that big? What was happening behind this zipper, where did he even keep this thing during it’s down time? Maker, he was going to break you.  
“Are we-are we um, gonna have sex?”  
He let out a humored breath through his nose, letting his helmet fall to rest against your naked shoulder while you palmed him. It sounded like nothing more than a crackle in the modulator but you knew the sound nonetheless, you’d heard it a thousand times.  
Obsessed with the faint warmth of your hand so close to his dick, he asked himself how he would even last for you if just this was sending him spiraling. His shakey finger tips returned to playing softly with your breasts, pinching your nipples between them. “If that’s what you want us to do,” he said.  
You reached for his zipper without hesitation, pulling it down and working the button free from its clasp. In the same breath he followed suit, hooking his fingers into the band of your pants and shimmying them down the curve of your hips, lifting your ass from the crates momentarily to slide them out from under you. You shoved his waistband down his hips until it fell mid thigh, his length springing from its confines and bobbing between his legs.  
Dank… Farrik.  
You didn’t even notice the bruises and scars that marred his thighs, every gash and slash and horrific burn he’d endured. No, nothing else mattered in this moment. You looked up to gauge his reaction only to notice he was staring at you too. At the wet and darkened patch of material still left covering the apex of your thighs. His dick twitched in rapidly heightening curiosity. Your cheeks were burning hot beneath your helmet, and as if to pry the embarrassment and attention off yourself your fight reflexes kicked in and you gripped him fully in your little palm.  
His top half lurched forward as a strangled groan escaped his helmet. “Fu-uck, cyar’ika,” he gasped, “warn a guy next time, please... I’m barely hanging on here.”  
You nodded your head in understanding, trailing your free hand up to push his shirt up his torso. He did you the favor of pulling his collar over his head, ridding himself of the final piece of his clothing so he could focus fully on the feeling of your hands around his cock. “Next time,” you agreed, running a thumb over the tip of him and watching as clear fluid beaded at the top.  
“Careful with me,” he bit, sighing heavily into the confines of his helmet. He was a pressure bomb, at any given moment you could slip and he’d be a goner.  
He snaked a warm finger beneath the crotch of your panties, his skin immediately met with the warm stickiness of your core. Slick coated the joints of his hands and fingertips on contact. He brushed his knuckles back and forth over you, watching your body react in desperate coos and subtle hip gestures. The more you moved against his hand, the wetter you became, and the wetter you became the more overt your grinding.  
When Din finally pulled your underwear fully down your legs, you pressed your helmet to his, the brashness of being naked for him made you curl into yourself. You must be a mess down there, you thought. You could feel it. The way you were dripping onto his fingers, Maker, he must think you’re so desperate for him, he hasn’t even put it inside of you, yet.  
Kriff, what were the two of you doing? Weapons scattered across the floor, clothes thrown to the dirt in haste. What if someone caught you. Exposed and writhing against each other just to feel a little friction. Helmeted fools who needed to get each other off so badly you were willing to put yourselves in danger for it. You should punch him, hard. Punch him for making you want him so badly. For making you so indescribably aroused you didn’t even care if you got caught at this point.  
Just as you were in your own little world, Din was in his. Cock aching at the sight of you. Your pussy, just pink and puffy and glistening. Little wisping hairs decorating your mound, juicy plush flesh fluttering for him when he used his thumbs to spread you open. He was lost in you. The only sound resonating in and out of his ear piece was the breathy moans that escaped your lips as he finally pressed a finger inside. If someone attacked he wouldn’t even hear them, he wouldn’t even notice them with you on display like this. Shit, you were warm and soft and so... so tight. Even just around his finger. He was going to have to go so slow with you, so gently when he stretched you open. Would you even want him again, if he hurt you? No, no he wasn’t going to hurt you. He would never hurt you.  
“How do we— do it?” You asked, head tilted back as he fingered you, it hurt at first, but now it was celestial. Moon shattering. Concordia would never hold a candle to this. You had one hand rubbing slowly up and down his length where it hung between your legs, the other draped over your own chest, toying with your pert nipples while he played you like a Kloo horn.  
“Well, I imagine fucking is quite like fighting,” he murmured, watching his finger disappear in and out of you, then glancing up to take your naked body in, revel in it, beg for it without any words.  
“Fight me then,” you sighed, “I think I can take you.”  
He stood up to full height, pressing the tip of himself against your heat and pulling you to the edge of the crate to meet him. You braced yourself on both his shoulders, helmets knocking together while you both sparred to look down at your bodies connecting.  
“You’d win, you’d be the death of me,” he let out in a breathy shudder, grinding his hips forward slowly to work you open around his tip.  
You cried out, fingernails digging into his skin the further he pressed on. “Oh shit, Din.”  
He stopped to feel you pulsing around him, to slow himself down while you squeezed him. Grunting and panting into his mask, throwing his own head back the longer his stroke went on. He knew, this was a fleeting moment for him, that he couldn’t hold on much longer, but you needed him to. You needed him to give this to you.  
“Talk to me, cyar’ika,” he groaned, “you never stop talking and now— ah, fuck me,” he swore, pushing the full length of himself inside of you in one movement. You reacted with a sweet moan against the side of his helmet that pierced his ear. He stilled, bringing both hands up to cup your helmet and stare into the visor.  
“Am I hurting you?” he asked, you could feel the twitch of his cock deep inside you as he tried to focus himself.  
“No, no not really,” you whispered, shifting your hips against him lightly to feel the friction. “I like it, I like the pain.”  
He shook his head back and forth in disbelief, gently rocking himself into your hips again to match your own erratic thrusts, “The death of me,” he repeated.  
His hips paced faster then, paired with shallow groans and bated breath, you wrapped your arms tight around his rib cage to hold him close to your body as he worked himself deeper inside of you with every thrust. Euphoric was the only way to describe this for Din. Every hunt he’d ever won came up short now, every fight where he threw the final punch, every gun duel, every last time he came in first. This feeling, the push and pull of your pussy around him, the way you moaned in his ear, shuddered under his touch, the half baked way his name tumbled off your lips every time he pulled out and went back in. He felt a heat at the small of his back, a jolt of electricity up his spine and he knew it was over. He knew that feeling was coming to a head and the breathless bliss was catastrophic.  
“You—you win,” he managed, grunting and writhing into you one last time before pulling out completely.  
You cried out at the loss of friction, head still in a tornado spin as you watched him come undone into his own hand before you, cursing and babbling your name in the heat of it.  
You rolled your hips against nothing, entranced by the creamy white seed of him standing stark against his tan skin, you wanted to taste it, to feel it, to have it inside of you so badly you whimpered out into the darkness of the mine.  
“I’m not done with you, cyar’ika,” he said, “don’t worry,” and then as quickly as he’d pulled out of you, you were full of him again.  
All this time, you had been grappling with the feelings you had for Din. Unsure of where the line was being crossed from friends to something more between the two of you. Your hard headed, fiery stubbornness paired impeccably with the soft spoken loyal warrior that was bringing you to cataclysmal highs right now. Puncturing every pleasure center inside you like he was made to do it. Like he fit inside you in the same way your beskar fit over your body. Like a second skin. Your limbs were all but turned to mush, and he held you there, against his body as he fucked into you again, and again and again until you couldn’t decipher light from dark. Until the war in your body was lost and you waved the white flag and the intense tightening in your core snapped like an over stretched bow and shattered. You utterly shattered around him.  
“That’s it, kar’ta, you’re so good to me,” he whispered into the side of your helmet, “showing me this side of you.” He held you still while your body shuddered, your nails digging so far into the skin of his back they’d leave half moon scars.  
\--  
What was the proper after-sex etiquette, exactly? You barely got yourselves through the main event and now it was just this slow, unwinding of limbs coupled with lots of awkward grunting and just- pure nakedness. You were both ass fucking naked and deliriously fucked out if you were being honest with each other and it was both the most exhilarating moment of your lives thus far but also the most … disconcerting? Neither of you knew what this meant, you knew how you felt but you didn’t understand the implications. The attachment, the love, that came long with having sex with someone you cared about. The way this connection would change the both of you for the rest of your lives. Din didn’t know, he never could have known.  
“I’m gonna..pull out now, ok?” He mused, rubbing circles into the tops of your thighs with his thumbs, tapping his helmet to yours. His concern was striking, and heartfelt, and it made you want him more deeply than you already did, but also reminded you of who you were, a fierce Mandalorian, not a distressed girl.  
“This is the easy part, Din,” you let out an exhausted chuckle, “I’m not made of glass.”  
“No,” he grunted, taking a short step back to unsheath himself from inside of you, you hummed along with him at the loss, “you’re made of blades, and blaster residue, and… snark. So much snark.”  
You butted his helmet with yours playfully, finally getting a look down at yourself and feeling a blinding embarrassment wash over you.  
Din noticed it too, dropping to his knees before you to get a more unobscured look. “Cyar’ika why didn’t you tell me I hurt you?” He ran a finger through the seam of you, bloody red finger emerging from your core, to your horror. “I’m so sorry.”  
“No, Din,” you started, grabbing his hand and rubbing the red from his fingers with your own palm. “You didn’t hurt me, it - it’s just something that happens. I knew it might happen, I-I just didn’t know, and I didn’t want to freak you out over the blood, and -”  
He stood to meet you, holding your hands in his own. “You thought I was going to freak out over some blood?” He kicked a plate of his own beskar next to his foot to prove a point, “that would be downright treasonous.”  
You nodded your head in agreement, laughing with him at the prospect, “This is the way.”  
It was as if he got better with every passing day, every single thing Din Djarin did dug the hole another foot deeper. Your relationship with each other sprouted from a seed and winded like a mercurial vine from such a young age you could probably even say you were rooted in each other. The same soil fed you, the same sunlight touched you, the same heart was born within each of you. You both weathered the same storms, survived the same draughts, bloomed together when the time was right. You were the water source he needed, he was your source of oxygen. There were ways he could get by without you, a passing rain, but you needed him more than you knew what to do with. Without him you couldn’t sustain. He told you that you’d be the death of him, but it was him who’d truly be the death of you.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Your relationship with Din Djarin grows deeper and more passionate with passing time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explicit depictions of sex.

“Happy 19th birthday, Din,” your helmets clanged awkwardly together as you whispered against his ear piece. 

The weeks following the afternoon the two of you had first had sex were nothing short of blissful and carefree. Abandoning whatever mundane tasks outside of your mandatory training exercises to find each other naked and vulnerable again in the security of that beskar mine, your beskar mine. Din had taken it upon himself to fabricate a makeshift cot of sorts for you both, pulling broken wooden crates from where they were deserted against the walls once upon a time, and bracing them together to build a pallet big enough for you both to lay on comfortably. He managed a few extra woolen blankets from the foundling barracks, and found it easy enough to bunch his cape up into a makeshift pillow for your head. It was just like Din, to care so much about the conditions he was working under. Where you were completely happy being pushed up against the hard rock barrier inside the mine, Din preferred you underneath him, breasts exposed, legs swung high over his hips, even his shoulders on some days. 

“Yeah, ha-happy birthday,” he shuddered into the confines of his own helmet, iron grip bruising your hips as you worked above him. 

“Not my birthday,” you giggled, bracing yourself with two hands on his chest. Your hips slotted up and down slowly on his dick, if you were torturing yourself with this you could only imagine what it was doing to him. 

“I don’t even know what - what ye-year it is, right now,” He ran a big warm hand up your torso, wrapping the entirety of it around one of your tits, rubbing the peak of it between his fingers. 

You had been at it for close to ten minutes at that point, riding him steadily until you were both sure you’d forgotten any and everything about life outside the mine. 

“It’s year 11,” you hummed, “your name is Din Djarin,” you grinded harder against him, positioning yourself in a way that your clit racked against the skin and hair at the apex of his hips. 

“That’s a cool na-name.” 

“You live on Concordia,” you continued, watching the muscles in his chest and stomach tighten and relax. You were so fascinated by his body. The rough and scarred exterior of it, the way each bump felt different on your fingertips. You could map him by now, you thought. If someone handed you pen and paper. You could draw each dip and valley, every rosy pink healed wound. 

“Is that the moon,” he huffed, “or- or the sun.” 

“The sun,” you quipped, thankful your girlish grin was hidden beneath a layer of beskar. 

“Feels like it,” he pushed back, running his hands over the entirety of you now. One sliding carefully around the shallow of your throat, feeling your pulse jolt beneath it, the other kneading the round of your ass as it bounced against him. 

“You’re a Mandalorian,” you sighed, leaning forward to press your neck against his palm. 

“S’debatable.” 

It was so easy, with Din, to get lost. Fabricate your own little world together where nothing else existed. In the darkness he was the light, the beacon, the way back home. As long as he was there you would always be found, but especially in this mine, where the only sounds were bated breath, skin connecting, your shallow whimpering into the vast dark nothingness followed by the hoarse groan of Din when he-

“Shit, cyar’ika,” he grunted, squeezing both your breasts in his hands as his release overcame him. You moaned unabashedly at the feeling of him coming warm and dense inside of you, throwing your helmet back to let your own high rush through your body. Your spine, your cunt, your legs, vibrating with pleasure. 

You collapsed against his chest in exhaustion, body’s spent and shaking as he wrapped his arms around your rib cage to hold you close as the two of you came down. There was nothing quite more intimate than this for you both. Din’s cock still filling you, slowly softening in this space seemingly carved specifically for him. Your hearts beating rapidly against one another, sweat sticking and drying sporadically, reminding you just how tangled your limbs had become. 

“I love when you do that,” Din mumbled, words nearly lost through the modulator, “you always sound so pretty.” 

\--

Maybe time moved more quickly, now that you had each other. When you were alone it was as if everything in the universe came to a galaxy shattering stop, but when you looked back the days had folded themselves neatly into months without a wrinkle. Naturally your relationship with Din had bloomed into something much more. Even to your friends and elders. You’d be at each other’s throat one minute over blaster mechanics, and the next tearing off into the privacy of the Torrent Wisps to “fight” over it, for only the Gods knew what reason. 

While the fun of being young and careless and uncontrollably horny of course was fuel enough for any mandalorian to engage in a relationship, this was all those things and also something entirely different. This was you and Din rising from the sinister black ashes of Aq Vetina as children, stolen from your parents and broken beyond reprisal, to finding a family in each other. That was never lost on either of you. 

—

“You’ve never told me anything about your parents,” you’d said one day, sitting back to back against Din while you ate. 

You did this often, turned away from each other so you could tip your helmets back just enough to slip a slice of bread and meat past your lips. 

“What’s there to tell?” You heard him chewing, could feel the ministrations of it in his shoulder blades. 

“I don’t know, what were they like? Were they funny or—sporty?” 

“Are those my only two options?” He jeered. 

You elbowed him below his ribcage, pulling an exaggerated grunt from his modulator in return. “Shebs’palon,” smartass you teased, picking a handful of berries from the container of food that you and Din shared, popping them into your mouth while you spoke. “No come on, what did they do?” 

“My dad was just a handy-man I guess, he built dwellings in our village,” Din reached for the berries then at the same time as you, playfully batting your hand away as you sparred for the food. “My mom was a teacher.” 

“That explains why you’re so good at everything,” you mused, “the best of both worlds.” 

“Tell that to 6 year old me holding the pegs of a ladder steady for dear life while my dad fastened metal to a roof.” 

“I wish I could have seen it,” you laughed wholeheartedly at the image of a faceless little Din, struggling on the sands of Aq Vetina. 

You’d lived in different factions of the planet before the Empire took control of it, never having met even as children, and you thought about that often. How you were so close to him all your life but still just a little too far away. You could have seen his face and known his smile had you only grown up just a few towns over. Then now of course, you were close to him in every sense of the word and at the same time complete strangers. If he passed you on the street without the helmet or the beskar he’d be just another face in the crowd to you, as you would to him. 

“What did he look like?” you questioned, “your dad?” 

“He was tall, but that could just have been because I was so short,” he chuckled a bit, “uh, dark hair, matched his eyes. I remember thinking when I was young that his eyes were so dark, that must be what space looked like.” 

You nodded along in understanding, as if you’d known this information all along, like it was somewhere embedded in your brain and you could see it clear as day. The curling bits of brown hair around his ears, the defined angles of his face along his jaw as Din described them. The sharp but befitting nose. Yeah you knew his face, you’d pictured it a million times. 

“Did he look kinda like you?” You asked, brushing your hands off on the knees of your pants. 

Din paused with that in a moment of intense realization over two things; one being the fact that despite the death of his parents, he would always carry them with him in ways untraceable, whether it be the face of his father amongst other things, or the wisdom of his mother. And two, that you were asking to know a detail more intimate about him than he’d ever allowed you before. You had quite literally watched his body come undone inside you and it still felt a long journey away from this admission. 

“Just like me, yeah.” he started, “He wasn’t perfect, but he loved me and my mom I know as much. Never let her lift a finger if she didn’t have to. He showed me how to barter in the marketplace, scrap junk for parts to build things that were actually worth something.” 

You smiled. Wholly. Entirely. Reaching back to find his hand and wrap your fingers between his own. “He sounds like he was a great dad, Din. He gave you a lot to remember him by.” 

So much time had passed since his parents died. When you become a Mandalorian, you’re stripped of the things that make you more than a beskar shell. He realized that before you asked, he hadn’t thought about the shape or texture of his fathers face in years. Somewhere along the way the memories were muddled and only the blurred edges of people and places from his childhood were left. 

“A much better father than I could ever hope to be,” his chest swelled, “I wouldn’t be alive, if it weren’t for him.” 

You pulled your helmet back down past your chin until it was snug on your head, and waited for Din to follow suit before you turned to face him on your knees. Your fingers were still entwined and you sat back against your own heels to be level with him while you peered into his visor. 

“You are going to be an amazing father Din,” you gushed, “you have every quality you mentioned of your father, and more. So much more. You’re so loyal, so careful and intelligent, and prideful without arrogance. You’re fierce and intense but also gentle and supportive.” You grinned under your helmet, “You make me look bad. Definitely make me look bad.” 

He pulled you into him, guiding the backs of your knees to either side of his hips to straddle his lap and wrap his heavy arms around your lower back. 

“Tell me more,” he crooned, “tell me about our children.” 

“Our children?” The shock in your voice wasn’t lost on him. “We’re having children now?” 

“Oh yes,” he squeezed you harder against him, eliciting a little squeak from your modulator. “So many children.” 

“You don’t even know what I look like Din,” you swatted him lazily, “what if they’re ugly.”

“That’s true,” he mumbled, lifting you carefully by your ass and laying you down softly on your back and shifting to hover over you. ‘They’ll only be ugly for a few years though and then we’ll get them one of these shiny helmets.” 

You were able to jolt a knee up and sting his groin, not enough to cause him true pain but enough to be a warning. Truthfully you were enthralled by the thought of carrying Din’s warriors. Nurturing them to birth and loving them with every fiber of your being, little stamps of yourself and him in the universe to look fondly up to you, as you and Din did to your own parents. 

“You burn hot, you know that,” Din sneered. “So beautiful, and powerful, but you’ll fucking kill me.” He jostled your knees back down beneath him again. “You’re like my own personal star. My ka’ra.”

His ka’ra. Huh. You could get used to that. 

You reached a hand up to lay against the cheek of his helmet. “We can’t have kids, Din.” 

“Why’s that?” He was shaking his head back and forth in disapproval almost immediately. “What’s stopping us?” 

Truly the only thing that was stopping you both was Riduurok. The sacred Mandalorian vow of marriage that prefaced starting a family together. It was always expected of you to, at some point complete this tenet of your creed. Raising a family as Mandalorians and further growing the clan. Why now that it would make the most sense, did it feel so foreign to do? Of course you would marry Din, but did you both feel this intensely about each other, or was it only you? 

“Riddurok,” you whispered, as if the word could pierce your skin. 

He nodded his head not so much in understanding as in approval. Reaching across his chest with one hand to press a firm hand to his heart. “Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar'tome-” 

“Din!” you shouted, ripping his hand away from his chest as if he was casting a dark spell on you. “As easy as that, huh?” You sat up abruptly, pushing him to his knees. Your heart was beating at lightspeed. He just tried to marry you. Right then and there, no qualms, no grand gestures, you hadn’t ever even outwardly admitted to love. The fucking nerve. 

“Nothing has ever been so easy for me,” he confessed, bringing your hands up to cross over the heart of his chest plate. “Growing with you, being with you,” he continued, but your shaking tone cut him off.

“I didn’t know you felt strongly enough to marry me, Din,” you all but hissed, “you’ve never admitted as much.” 

“Well neither have you,” he bit back.   
“I’m not the one who just started reciting the riduurok in a fucking cave!” 

“So you don’t want to marry me then!” he raised his voice to match, “It’s simple.”

You groaned into your hands, wary of your implications. You didn’t want to be the one to say it. Stubborn as you always were. You always felt you gave yourself over to Din too eagerly and no matter how evenly he returned your energy it was almost embarrassing to you to feel, like this. This horrific ingraining of the Mandalorian mentality seeped deep into your bones and you needed to have the upper hand. Never show your cards, never uncover your vulnerabilities. Time and time again you found yourself a puddle for him. You let your guard down for him with alarming regularity. 

“I do, want to marry you,” you conceded. 

He knew you better than yourself at this point. Understanding that you didn’t want to give too much of yourself away, for fear you would inevitably be burned. Perhaps both of you struggled when it came to this because you knew what it was like to love and to lose someone, how it leaves you an empty shell. For you he would live in an empty beskar shell for eternity. 

He pulled your hands against his chest again, leaning forward to press the forehead of his helmet against your own, “Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum, ner ka’ra.” I love you, my star. 

There were a few times you truly were thankful for the helmet. This moment being one as your cheeks burned hot, and the threatening swell of tears brimmed at your eyelashes. Din was everything for you. Be all, end all. While the both of you knew you loved one another long before this point, the admission of it felt like a dam breaking after years of being on the precipice. 

“Ni kar’tayl gar darasuum, Din,” you returned. “Darasuum, darasuum, darasuum.” forever. 

\--

The sex was different this time. Not rushed, or messy or clumsy. Din’s hands, tender as they peeled you away layer by layer. You loved the way he handled you, like his prized possession. Always careful and deliberate. 

“Tell me you love me again, ka’ra,” he huffed, sliding the hard length of himself through your plumped folds, spreading your slickness across his dick until you were writhing under him. He stopped to press the head to your clit, rubbing slow circles in reaction with your hitching breaths. “I want to hear it, every minute of every day for the rest of my life.” 

You giggled in return, slotting your hips with his and pulling him closer to your entrance by the back of your heels. Your legs were wrapped tight against his sides, arms hanging loosely around his thick neck. Your fingers crept beneath the lip at the back of his helmet, shaking slightly when you felt the smooth wisps of Din’s hair curling as the base. 

“I love you, Din Djarin,” you beamed, pushing his ass harder with your heels to bring his hips against yours, feeling him finally push against your fluttering core. “Now fuck me.” 

He pierced you easily, sliding through your hot, wet walls to the base almost immediately. You panted hard against his helmet, humming in contentment at the feeling of him so heavy and thick inside of you. You would never tire of this, arching your back to meet him as he pumped recklessly into you. With him inside of you it was as if you were living constantly on the teetering edge of an orgasm. 

“I dream about you, you know,” Din grunted, pinching the tight peak of your nipple between his fingers and rolling it. “You come to me every night.” 

You whimpered beneath him, raking your nails down his back, feeling the grinding of his muscles beneath his skin as he worked you open. 

“You always looks so beautiful, begging me with those ‘fuck me’ eyes.” He pulled one of your legs from around him, hitching it so the back of your knee rested against his shoulder. Changing the angle just so, that you felt your spine go numb. 

“Oh yeah?” you challenged, “You see me, really see me?” 

“I see you, yeah,” he grunted, pulling the other leg around to match the first, letting your calves cage either side of his helmet. “I taste you too.” 

“Din-” you gasped in warning, letting your eyes flutter closed to picture his face notched between your thighs. 

“I spend hours tasting your pretty pink pussy,” his hips racked harder and harder against you, his balls tapping rhythmically on the skin of your ass. “So fu-ucking sweet.” 

You let an insatiable hand slither down your body to touch yourself at his words. Painting the vivid design of his tongue against your clit. Picturing it, grinding your own two little fingers hard against your bundle of nerves. “More, Din. Sa-say more.” 

“It’s fucking unbelieveable ka’ra,” he choked out. “The pretty noises that come from those lips without the helmet. When I get my mouth on you, on your cunt, on your perfect - tits,” he broke, pinching your nipples between his fingers and then holding the weight of your breasts in both his palms. 

“Please, don’t stop.” You felt yourself growing hotter by the second, vibrating at the voice booming above you and the fullness of Din thrusting unapologetically into your dripping core. With the sultry vision of him licking and marking every inch of your body with his hot mouth paired with you toying roughly with your clit, nothing could have gotten you there faster. 

“My fa-avorite thing you do ka’ra,” he grunted, slowing his thrusts down slightly to hit you hard and deep with every slam of his hips, “is come all over my cock while my mouth is on yours, so I ca-an feel you moaning on my ton-gue.” 

Shit. 

You keened. Rocking your hips up and against him as you came. You hardly heard Din collapse between your legs and follow, too busy playing catch up with your own senses and surroundings. After a minute, the white noise that clouded your ears abated, your legs steadied from their fit of trembling enough that you could tug them tight to your chest to calm your breathing as Din pulled out of you with a choked gasp. 

“Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar'tome,” we are one when together, we are one when parted, you started, catching your breath between the phrases. 

“Ka’ra-” Din laughed, head resting against the dip between your breasts. 

“If you don’t marry me right now Din Djarin, so help me Maker,” you waited for an interjection from him but it never came. 

“mhi me'dinui an, mhi ba'juri verde.” we will share all, we will raise warriors.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Ridduurok, comes responsibility. You and Din grapple with your vows in the best way you know how.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explicit depictions of sex. Breeding kink. Lactation kink.

You found it terrifying and also electrifying how you could even want him while you were asleep. How love could burn so deep into the core of a human being that it melted your bones. Through your muscle and tendon and veins until your insides felt molten. Where there wasn’t physical contact there was a mental morphosis like you were surviving on the same wavelength. A tilt of a helmet, a clench of a fist, you spoke in gestures, and sighs and stuttering breaths. He said ‘I love you’ without words constantly. Simple gestures like cleaning your weapons, preparing you food, redressing your naked body when it was succumbed by exhaustion.

One of your favorite habits of Din was how he walked just a step behind you, clearly as a sign of respect for his impenetrable partner; but never lingering so far he wasn’t staking his claim. You were his, and every Mandalorian on Concordia knew this as absolute. Be you both young and green — that was no such thing when it came to Riduurok. Taking a vow that would further your pillars of being a Mandalorian, raising warriors, was looked upon with esteem. And evermore the implications that followed marred your thought process incessantly— everyone around you knew, and Din made sure of it, that he was breeding you. Conception for a Mandalorian is sacred. While it may sound diminishing or derogatory, the expectation to spend hours of time with your thighs spread and core pumped full of your riduur, it was nothing of the sort. A Mandalorian woman with-child was a deity to the culture, and Din already treated you as such.

—

“They all stare at me now like I’m nothing but a hole for your dick,” you scoffed, kicking a lone obsidian rock across the dusty forest floor. 

“No,” Din qualmed, “they don’t look at you any different than they did before.” He picked up the rock you’d booted as he walked by, stuffing it into the side of his gun belt. “Everyone knew long before we took our vow that we’d been—”

“Fucking? Everyone knew we were fucking.” 

“It’s not uncommon,” he said, breathing in a deep sigh, “the only difference is we’re married now.” 

“Right but with marriage comes responsibility to grow our clan,” you bit back, bracing a hand over your lower stomach subconsciously. 

Din stopped in his tracks, hands on hips in contemplation as you whipped around to face him. “Is that not what you wanted ka’ra? I thought that’s what we both wanted.” 

Your cheeks grew hot with guilt. Of course it’s what you wanted, bearing Din’s children, raising as many of his warriors as your body would allow. It was just the expectation wearing heavy on your bones, and you knew Din must have felt the same as well. You both understood the importance of children after Riddurok, and creed was everything to Din. As much as he could play it off that other Mandalorians weren’t paying the pair of you more attention, it was undeniable. You found worry settling into your body at every corner now. What if you couldn’t have children? What if you were a bad mother? You were so volatile and hot-headed in comparison to your stable partner. What if he ever regretted the decision to marry you and it was too late? 

“I want it,” you crooned, “I just— I don’t want to ever disappoint you.” 

He was quick to close the gap between you, taking a firm hold to both sides of your helmet as he shook his head in bewilderment. “Stop talking like that, do you hear me?” You nodded your head in terse movements. “Is that not what love is ka’ra? Excitement and adoration and longing and lust— but also expectations and disappointments, hardships, lessons.” 

“How are you like this all the time?” You mumbled and Din tilted his head, humming in question. “Just so unimaginably perfect,” you groaned playfully. 

“I just listen during training,” he teased, bumping his beskar forehead with your own, “they teach us all this stuff you know, you’re just — usually sharpening knives or something.” 

“They do not teach us that,” you rolled your eyes beneath the helmet, “they teach us the easiest way to kill everything with a pulse or a central wiring harness.” 

“It’s all hidden messages.” 

“Yeah yeah yeah,” you turned back down your path continuing to walk along with Din’s gloved hand tangled in your own, “so you should know then that I don’t like being ogled at like — like a fucking seed slut.” 

He full blown snorted, keeling over a bit while he walked with a dramatic hand to his chest “A what?”

“Just a woman you fuck with intention to breed,” you sniveled. “You know what I fucking meant, Djarin.” 

“Well—” he shrugged nonchalantly. 

You wasted no time unsheathing a blade from your sleeve, holding it hard enough to the fabric on his back to draw blood from the surface protecting his kidney. 

“You know I’m kidding ka’ra,” he chuckled, swiping lazily at your offending wrist with his surrender. “You’re not just a woman.” 

You sighed in amusement, pulling him further along the path toward your mine. You both could have walked this trail with your eyes closed at that point. Your mind mapped the winds and curves that slotted through the thick shrubbery and trees seamlessly. A cascading wall of Torrent Wisp trunks that shouldered one another for a few meters before branching over the ground like an awning, followed by splintered chunks of black obsidian drawing the hike to the left and up a short summit before down again and into a vast dust filled opening. Several perching Shriek Hawks always dotted the lower hanging trees over the course of the trek, less like predators to the Mandalorians and more like protectors. Your tribe had adapted the rugged form of a Shriek Hawk as a signet on their beskar. Din had refused a signet from his elders until he could “earn it”, always hoping for a noble kill to present itself on Concordia, or perhaps some other planet if his life turned him to the Bounty Hunters Guild as it had so many Mandalorian before him. 

“There’s something very sexy to me, about the idea of getting you pregnant,” Din confessed, leading you through the open mouth of the beskar mine as you reached it. 

“Sexy huh?” You plopped yourself onto the make-shift cot Din had constructed, working on freeing your arms and legs from your beskar. This had become regular practice for the two of you, stripping free of your shields in the safety of the abandoned mine. While, yeah, you practically always ended up naked and entangled in each other in the heat of it, taking off the armor was now more a sentiment to the trust you shared. “A big round belly, sagging tits, to die for.” 

“You’ll be radiant, ka’ra,” he dropped down next to you, his armor falling to the wayside as yours did. He pulled your backside into his chest, molding your hips into the crook of his own and draping a hand over your middle, rubbing little circles into your stomach with his thumb. “Growing full of our child, protecting them inside your body. That’s how strong you are. Your entire body is armor.” 

You ground your hips back into him a bit, loving the feeling of him hardening at just the thought of your hips growing wider, middle rounder, your breasts heavy with milk. 

“You love my tits now though, won’t you be disappointed when they stretch and swell?” You swear you heard him groan, shoving what he could fit of his helmet into the crook of your shoulder and neck. 

His hand that had been playing with the skin of your stomach snaked up and under your shirt then, taking a palm full of your breast and massaging the weight of it. “So soft,” he murmured, moving onto the other breast and kneading it just the same, “I can’t wait to take care of all the most sensitive parts of you, ka’ra— worship you while you carry our warriors.” 

You moved your hips against him more blatantly, reacting to the stirring pangs of arousal beaming in your core as he spoke. You tried to give him more than just a low sigh and lazy mhm but it was as if he’d stolen your ability to talk, pinching your nipples and dropping his hand down to plunge past the band of your pants. 

“Shit you are so, so wet,” he ran a long middle finger from your clit to core sending a wave of heat up your spine. “Fuck.” He pressed himself against your ass while you moved, searching for friction. 

You found yourself pulling the hem of your shirt up just past the peak of your breasts, revealing them to the open air and for Din to watch and fondle unhindered. Your back arched in pleasure as he slipped his finger into the dripping hole of your pussy, stretching you slowly before adding another. You mewled into the confines of your helmet, reaching back to palm him in time with grinding your clit into the heel of his hand. 

“More?” He asked, pushing the band of your pants down to your knees, revealing your ass and allowing you just enough give to widen your legs. You nodded fervently, doing your best to unhinge the buckle on his pants and pull the zipper down while facing away from him. “Spread your legs for me ka’ra,” he whispered against the side of your helmet, and you obeyed, hanging in the balance as he plunged a third finger inside of you. 

You could feel that familiar tightening in your stomach growing more and more apparent as Din curled his fingers against your walls. He slid his other arm under your side and around your body to cage you into him completely, one hand playing with your pussy, rubbing pressure into your clit as his fingers stroked you, the other hand toying and pulling at your nipple in tandem. 

“When you’re with-child,” he started, groaning through his modulator as you finally found his cock and freed it through the zipper of his pants, “your breasts will fill with milk, and when I do this to you—” he squeezed the flesh around the perking bud of your nipple, “it will drip down your chest and your stomach and you know what I’m gonna do?” 

You shook to her head no with a breathy hum, squeezing your eyes shut to imagine Din’s words come to life, the milky liquid spilling from your breasts as he touched you. He pulled his fingers from inside you for a moment, enough to send a shudder of petulance through you before he reached between your bodies and replaced them with the head of his cock, pushing inside of you in one vigorous motion. “Oh— fu-fuck,” you cried out, orgasm teasing you at its cusp. 

“I’m gonna taste it, my star,” He grunted out, “I’m gonna suck it clean off my fingers every chance I get,” you watched his hand that had been piercing your body moments before disappear beyond your line of vision just behind your head. “Just like this,” you heard the wet lap of his tongue against the skin of his knuckles as he slipped his fingers beneath the lip of his helmet.

“Shit—” you drawled out, mind heavy with lust and vivacion. You could feel the needy way your pussy kept contracting around the thickness of Din like it was gasping for air. 

“Go ahead ka’ra, I know you’re gonna cum for me.” 

You sighed into your modulator as he thrust away into you at that hammering, deafening pace that was making your legs go numb and your eyes roll back. A quiet mhm was all you could give him in return. 

“I think you like it when people stare at us ka’ra,” he choked, feeling his own end creeping up on him at light speed. “You do, don’t you? You want people to know that I’m breeding you, you want them to know I’m the one filling you with my cum every single day.” His hips matched the enunciation of his words. “Tell me I’m right.” 

At this point everything he said to you was passing through like commlink static, but for some reason that last bit was as clear as day. You could count on one hand how many seconds you had left before your climax took over your body but you still scampered enough energy to answer him, “ye-yeah,” you sighed, “you’re right.” 

“Fuck you don’t know what it does to me, to hear you say that,” Din grumbled, baring down on you and pinching your clit between his fingers to send you careening into the abysmal blackout of your orgasm. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he growled through his teeth, “that’s it, let go for me.” Din bit hard enough down onto his own bottom lip to draw blood as your pussy started milking him. “You want me to fill you up ka’ra?” He trembled in the wake, holding off until he heard you give him any sort of approval. 

“Please,” you reached a lazy arm up to wrap around his helmet and pull it further into the blade of your shoulder to keep him grounded. “Please fuck me full of your seed, riduur.” 

Din stilled and shuddered into his release, feeling hot ropes of himself paint your insides again and again until he was panting from exertion as much as exhaustion. He kept still for long after the sweat had dried, leaving himself to soften inside your body as you both laid against one another drifting into a state of relaxation akin to sleep. 

— 

“I got you something,” Din mumbled, breaking through the quiet ambience of the mine when he felt you stir for the first time. 

You grumbled, turning your body in his arms to face him, obviously still struggling with a layer of exhaustion. “I hope it’s a dwelling, we really gotta get a place that’s not 10 clicks into the darkwoods.” 

He laughed, sitting up to stretch across the cot and fish through the pockets on his gun belt. Eventually he found whatever it was he was looking for, taking a beat to stare at the object in his palm before turning back to face you. You sat up in curiosity, tilting your helmet as he took his seat next to you again. 

“Gimme your hand,” he outstretched his own and you obliged, placing your open palm in his. “Close your eyes, please” 

You did, but Din knew you well enough too, because you popped one eyelid open behind the visor only to be met by a brief push to the side of your head and then darkness. He had switched the sight setting on your helmet. Smart man. 

You felt something featherlight placed in your palm a moment later. “Definitely not a dwelling,” you teased. 

Another brief tap to the side of your helmet and your sight returned to reveal a shiny metallic band in your grip. A ring. Pure beskar by the immediate looks of it. Your heart hammered against your ribs as short uneven breaths queued in your throat. “Din —”

“Let’s see how it fits,” he cut you off, pulling your left hand in front of him and sliding the metal slowly down the frame of your finger until it fit snuggly at the base of your knuckle. 

“Perfect,” you mused, flipping your hand palm up and down several times to watch the dim light reflect against the jewelry. At dull guilt settled deep in your chest. You hadn’t gotten him anything, nothing like this betrothal token you would proudly wear long after old age or death had taken you from the universe. 

“It’s nothing crazy,” he shrugged, seemingly reading your mind. “And I know no one will ever see it underneath your gloves but, I’ll know it’s there.” He rubbed his thumb over the curving metal around your ring finger as he held your hand. “Remember the beskar coin I was awarded after I got through ambien rifle training? I used that.” 

“That was still so special to you,” you sighed, overwhelmed by him. His selflessness, his loyalty in wanting you to wear a symbol of him, his love. Din was eternal for you. As you would always be for him. 

“I’ll have another one soon, after we finish training in the Rising Phoenix,” he expressed confidently, already expecting to come out on top of your training class. 

“They’re never giving me one of those jet packs,” you laughed, pulling his helmet down to meet yours in utter adoration. The moment felt fleeting as that ache in your chest grew sharper. “I don’t have anything for you, Din. I feel stupid.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous, ka’ra,” he brought your head back to his as you tried to pull away, “I have everything. You are everything.” 

—

As much as you knew Din would never expect, and may even be reluctant to accept anything from you if you offered, this was important. Giving him a piece of yourself as he had done for you. You dawdled with the ring hugging the finger under your glove as you strode ahead through the little village of Mandalorians that was your home on Concordia. Past leather workers and agricultural engineers helping clients, through short smoky alleyways flanked by clay and mud built homes. Dim lit lights in the dusk were all that was necessary with the bright red face of Mandalore sitting in the night sky. You stumbled over yourself to move quickly through the streets without looking completely erratic. Although The Armorer you sought was always easily found in her kiln room, as if time was running out, you felt the need to get to her before the dawn of another day.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story of you and Din comes to its destined end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Violence. Death. Loss of a child. Depression and Grieving. Sexual implications. 
> 
> The final part of Jate’kara! Thank you for reading my love letter to canon for The Mandalorian. I always felt Din needed a backstory and I broke my own heart with it, but it felt right.

Nights on Concordia were never as dark as they could be. The bright light of the moon's atmosphere keeping the landscapes blanketed in dim green hues. But, it was eery still because of the quiet. The unending quiet from the highest peaks to the most shrouded valleys. The slow rumbling of the river playing like an ambient record was the soundtrack to the forest but even that was pitter-patter the further away you were. There were no secrets in the woods. You could hear it all. Every pebble kicked, waning branch moved, every Shriek Hawk cawing in its cave. You would never miss the reverberating metallic touch down of a foreign ship; or the scattering of footsteps on muddied soil, the grumbling voices, the blasters charging. You couldn’t miss them. 

Unless you weren’t listening. 

—

You had made it in the knick of time, thank fuck. The blazing kiln of embers, still being fed and nurtured by the Armorer while she hammered shape into beskar. You hadn’t visited there in some time, years had passed since your old chest plate was shed for a new one to accommodate certain features of your body. Din never had to worry about that, a flat chest for one Mando was a flat chest for another, the men traded and sold their armor amongst each other freely, painting it and marking it to reflect themselves. For you, and other Mandalorian women, your armor was yours. Molded to you, whether passed down generationally and altered or formed new from melted iron. It would never fit another body as well as it did yours. 

“Do you have something for me, foundling?” The Armorer never looked up from her work, pressing and batting at a shiny silver cuirass as she spoke. 

Pulling half of a small dull chest piece from where it was tucked into your gun belt, you held it out in your palm for the Armorer to see. It was a figment of your past, the inaugural shred of Mandalorian armor given to you to wear your first night on Concordia. It had since been battered and bruised and the polish left little shine to the imagination, but it was a love letter to the hardened warrior you had become, the one you always were. When it was time to come into your new armor, back in those transformative years of your youth, you’d kept a piece for yourself as a reminder; then watched the rest melt together with the plates of hundreds of others to be re-formed and redistributed amongst the clan. 

“Thank you,” she said plainly, “I will add it to the reserve to be melted when necessary.” 

“Actually, I was hoping you could mold this for me,” you stepped closer to the working table, placing the beskar on the gray rock between you both. “A gift, for my Riduur.” 

She inspected the chest plate, picking it up and weighing it in her own hand, finally catching your visor in her eyesight before nodding and turning toward the hot coals of the kiln behind her. “A pendant would do nicely.” 

“Yes,” you agreed, observing as she placed the piece in the flames, letting it slowly drip molten down into the base of a pan. 

“And how is your marriage faring, little one?” She quizzed, voice dripping in nosey inquisition. She turned back to you, busying herself with creating a mold of sorts, pinching black rock between the fingers of her gloves, bringing a small carving knife down to cut into the pieces. She moved so gracefully, deft hands skilled from years of crafting the strongest material this galaxy has ever seen. 

You stumbled on the question, too transfixed with watching her in her work space, “My marriage?” You cleared your throat, “Oh, yeah it’s - faring— um, it’s faring well. Well enough. Very well actually.” 

She set the small mold she’d just fastened onto the counter top, “I expect you’re expanding the clan, then?” She asked, nonchalantly pouring the searing pan of melted beskar into the empty carcass of black rock. “Completing your resol’nare.” 

Not this shit again. The pillars of being a Mandalorian had been battered and beaten into your brain for ten years now. Wearing beskar armor, mastering self-defense, devoting your life to the clan, speaking Mando'a, answering the Mandalore’s call to action, and raising children as Mandalorians. You couldn’t escape it. 

“You know, we really can’t seem to figure out where the cum goes,” you blew a lazy raspberry through your lips, “is it just — directly into my mouth every time? Or—”

“You seem like a smart girl,” she cut you off, pouring the last of the beskar and letting the mold sit idly for a time, “outspoken, brash, still figuring your way in this galaxy, but smart regardless of the never ending unfiltered sarcasm,” ouch. 

You let out a nervous chuckle, and your fake disposition died on your tongue with a sigh. “Look I get that you’re trying to play ‘clan mother’ or something right now, but I’m an adult, okay?” You accentuated your words with gestured quotations in the air, “I don’t need a mother, and I have my resol’nare under control.” She used a pair of long metal clamps to pick up the scorched mold, dipping it into a basin of cooling liquid and letting the sound of hot metal simmer along with the moment, “maker, why is everyone so interested in the intricacies of my husband's dick inside of me?” 

You thought you could hear a barely there laugh leave her modulator. “Remember no one is invincible, foundling,” she said, “you can only get very, very close.” The pair of you watched as the mold sizzled to a stop before the Armorer removed it from the basin. She hammered it open, cracking the burnt and broken pieces away from the shining metal beneath until you saw the shape of the beskar come to life. 

“A mythosaur,” you uttered, as the woman brushed excess dust from the face of the skull. She thread a wiry black string through the pendant, then held it out for you to take. 

“An ancient symbol of our people, dating back to Mandalore the First”, she explained, watching you run the thumb pad of your glove over the shining metal, “It’s a sacred emblem, and a reminder that we who wear this armor can overcome even the largest and most deadly of obstacles. Mandalorians are always stronger together. This is the way.” 

“This is the way.” 

—  
If you were being truthful with yourself, you hadn’t bled in several weeks. Possibly a couple months had passed completely lost in the feeling of Din all around you, inside your head, under your skin, on every inch of your body. You just simply, hadn’t thought about it. Hadn’t felt any different, hadn’t been sick or weak or been more tired. Maybe more of an appetite, but you were much more active, so it made sense.

It took the Armorer’s comments about the clan expanding, to force you to think about it, really think about it, and as you bound away from the armory and through the populated streets of the village, realization hit you like a brick. That the last time you bled was months ago, mere weeks after the first time you and Din had sex. You remembered thinking it would deter him, scare him away from you for the few days it took to subside but he fucked you through it all. Nothing is going to keep me away from your body, not now that you’re mine, not ever, he had said, and you melted into the euphoric feeling of his cock soothing your aching abdomen, and you came for him over and over again from the hypersensitivity. Your body would crash to shore like a wave and before you could recover the next peak was barreling into you again. You didn’t know it could feel that good. 

“Shit,” you whispered to yourself, slowing the pace of your walk to a crawl as you took it all in. He’d done it, Maker be damned. He got you pregnant. That shiny fucker got you pregnant. And long before the two of you even expected it. Blissfully ignorant to the growing life inside of you for months now. You put a soft hesitant hand to your stomach, as if it could calm the way your brain was running a mile a minute. There’s a little… person in there. Your little person. More than that, you and Din’s little person. Your love had made this. A warrior.

“Shiiiiiiiiit,” you exhaled, quite a bit louder this time as you reached the skirts of town and dipped into the heavy brush of the forest. You had wanted this your whole life. With Din, embarrassingly for most of it as well, never mind only marrying the man weeks prior. But now, now that it was real, were you even capable? Could you even succeed at being the sole protector of another being? You could barely take care of yourself on most days. Stumbling gracelessly through everything since you were ten years old. You had a sharp tongue and a short temper, a fiery disposition on a good day. And yeah, you could pull your weight in a fight and hit a target from a pretty considerable distance away, you could curse your way through a few languages and you were deadly with a vibro blade but being a mother? 

But then maybe, this is what was meant for you all along. The missing piece of your life you always thought to blame on your creed. The vacant feeling in your chest that Din had patched time and time again. A child, someone to focus only the best and most loving parts of yourself into. Din was everything you’ve ever needed, but he was a catch all. The good, the bad and the ugly that came along with you since you were barely 5 feet tall he had endured, but with a child, you could fix that. You could be the person you needed for yourself. The mother, that you needed for yourself. 

“Who will you be, ad’ika? little one” You asked softly, finding it both silly to be talking to yourself and intensely intimate nonetheless, “a warrior, like your buir, I hope,” you laughed quietly, “don’t take after me I’m begging, I never learned how to stay out of trouble.” You continued the trek back to the mine, smiling as you imagined Din, holding the tiny little hands of a child while they walk, soothing their hair while they sleep. Of all the things you’ve seen Din do in his life, the image of him as a father, was sweeter than them all. “Let’s go tell him you’re here,” you cooed, “he’s going to be so happy.” 

—

He was still exactly where you left him, splayed out on his belly across the expanse of the cot, wooly blanket half covering his lower back and thighs, half hanging lazily off the edge and onto the dusty floor of the mine. He was so— beautiful, you thought. Strong ridges of tan skin tight around his spine and shoulder blades, little dashing scars littered around his rib cage, one thicker, darker one ripping across his upper back. You probably gave him a significant number of those throughout the years, tiny imprints of you on his body that would stay with him forever. 

You were happy watching him sleep for a while. Plopping down on your ass in the dirt with your back pressed against the hard rock of the wall. You could hear his low snore slipping melodically through the modulator, and it was comforting. It was comforting to know he had felt just as safe in your presence as you did in his. Willing to let his guard down, quite literally take off the armor, and be naked with you in more than just the physical ways.

You slipped your gloves off, just then remembering the shiny silver ring around your finger. It was as if it had been there all along, an extension of your skin. The Mythosaur pendant was burning a hole in the pocket of your gun belt and you unbuttoned the satchel to take it out and look at it properly for the first time. You fumbled it in your palm, tracing the long horns of the skull, testing the sharp point at the tips with the meat of your fingers. A sheepish smile pulling at your lips beneath your helmet as you imagined it becoming a family heirloom, the Mythosaur necklace passed down from Din to his own son when the time was right. 

“You left me, ka’ra,” his voice was still rough with sleep as you looked up to find him watching you, chin of his helmet perched on his forearms. “I thought you’d finally had enough of me.” 

You breathed out a laugh through your nose, abandoning your usual bout of sarcasm as you answered him, “Never.” 

“Where’d you go?” He sat up on the bed, smoothing the sheets out around him and patting the surface, “come here.” 

“I went to see the Armorer,” you tutted, joining him on the thin mattress. You held out the Mythosaur pendant for him to see it, swinging softly between the two of you. “For you.” 

His back straightened, speechless as he plucked the hanging necklace from the air and held it close to his visor. Of course there was no way to gauge a reaction from his face but you found the ambient silence more telling than anything else. The way he took his time feeling all the dips and curves of the skulls surface, flipping it over to inspect every edge, admire it. He closed it in his fist and held it against his heart. “Ka’ra, this is too much.” 

“It’s not,” you replied without a beat, shaking your head in disagreement, “you give me everything, please— let me give you something.” 

He tangled his fingers in your own, brushing your knuckles with his thumb, “where did you find the beskar?” 

“I stole it,” you joked, “they’ll be here any minute to take it back, so get a good look while you can.” 

Din pushed you with his shoulder, chuckling through the vocoder, “I wouldn’t put it past you.” 

“It’s my beskar,” you said, “from when we were young. I kept a piece when the rest got burned.” 

Din shifted to snake his arm around you, pulling your body impossibly close to his until you were falling into his lap. “I will wear this forever, ka’ra,” He nudged the face of his helmet with your own, “ni kar'tayl gar darasuum,” I love you, you nodded along to his words, “we belong to each other.” 

It was hard to breathe around him. This all encompassing man that made you feel like you held all the stars in the galaxy in the palm of your hand. Like creed was nothing if not for you. You wrapped your arms around his neck, fingers splaying out beneath the back of his helmet to tug and play with the soft curls. “We belong to someone else now, too.” 

His hands instinctively traveled to the fabric covered skin of your stomach, holding you there against him, “ved’ika? little warrior?” He asked, his voice soft with shock. “Tell me it’s real, ner cyare, my love. Don’t break my heart.” 

You nodded excitedly, cupping his neck in your palms, rubbing little circles into his skin, “It’s real.” You couldn’t help the giddy laugh that escaped you then as Din squeezed you so tightly to his body you thought he may break your ribs. “Careful!” You yelped, pressing your weight into his until he fell back against the blankets. 

“When did you know?” 

“Honestly, I just figured it out tonight,” you traced a trail of beauty marks across his rib cage like a constellation, and giggled when he jerked his body as you hit a spot that tickled him. “The Armorer asked about ‘growing the clan’,” you scoffed. 

“How dare she,” Din fake gasped and then shielded his groin as you playfully jabbed at him. 

“If only you could see me rolling my eyes,” you quipped. He reached over to start pulling your armor off slowly, shiny cuirass by shiny cuirass giving shape to your body as the layers were peeled. “She reminded me that marriage doesn’t allow pregnancy,” you sighed, “that I’ve been looking for all the signs since our Riduurok, when I probably should have been looking for them long before that.” 

“How much longer?” He quickly understood. 

“Months Din, maybe three now,” you pried off your chest plate while he worked on the shields across your thighs and knees. “It’s still early yet, but we’ve been reckless.” 

“Have you felt any different?” 

“No, no, it’s the reason I didn’t realize sooner,” you shrugged out of your protective layers, your shirt and pants shimmied from your body and shucked into the dust as Dins hands wandered. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. You know? I’m so happy and I’m so scared at the same time. I don’t know now if I’ve been missing all these signs, and hurting our child without even realizing it.” 

“Shhh,” Din hushed you, pulling your body down to mold against him, “our child is perfect,” he said, “you’re perfect.” 

The intimacy of it all was emotional. You felt warm tears well in your eyelashes while he scratched his fingernails down your back to comfort your nerves. This very simple gesture of touch for you and Din was always so intense. Spending so many years of your lives hidden behind a helmet, yearning to touch one another and then to taste one another, to truly indulge was never an option, but you pushed the limits every time to get as close as you could. You’d never stop wanting him in ways you couldn’t have him. His lips against yours, his tongue leaving burning trails on your skin. You know he felt the same. 

“I want to kiss you,” you murmured. 

His helmet lulled toward you lazily, a crackled sigh filtering through the vocoder, “me too mesh’la, in another —” 

“No— not in another life. I want it in this life,” you sat up to peer down at him, “I want everything in this life, with you. We shouldn’t have to fucking die for that, for just one time.” 

He sat up to face you, his tender hands holding you steady as they cupped your neck, “our creed, ka’ra,” 

“We don’t have to look, Din,” you threaded your fingers through the hair under the base of his helmet again, “we can keep our eyes closed, right? Lift the helmets just enough,” you weren’t sure who needed more convincing, you or him, trying to read his mind through his visor bleeding into your own, “Creed doesn’t say anything about that.” 

You were wading in the waves of his hesitation, floating cooly, waiting for the tide to leave you flat on your back or drag you to the unforgiving deep. 

“Okay,” he nodded slowly and you could feel the skin on his neck heating up beneath your palms, “just once.” 

You straddled his hips then, and let him trail his hands across your torso, grazing you softly, like his touch may break you. You dragged your hands from their place tangled in the back of his hair to the sides of his helmet. He followed suit, fingertips feather light on your shoulders and then hesitant, curling under the edge of your own helmet. 

“Just once,” you promised, and you both closed your eyes in the moment as the burden of temptation finally took its toll. 

That’s why you never heard it. Too preoccupied with one another to notice the buzzing trill of a ship’s engine as it landed only two clicks away, its metallic silver body, disguised in the thick overcast of trees and skylight. The concentrated footfall that left twigs snapping and foliage ruffling in its wake. A merry band of pirating nomads, making their way through the galaxy pillaging for scraps left in the mud and sands of abandoned planets. Someone in their travels had tipped them off about Concordia, the innocuous home of banished Mandalorians. Hundreds of mines housing unearthed precious metal that would make them rich. ‘Bucket heads will never even know you’re there.’

If it weren’t for love. Din would think back on. If he weren’t so blinded by the trivial promises of forever. If only he hadn’t given the Gods a reason to punish him. 

Before the helmets even left your shoulders an unfamiliar voice pulled you back to reality. 

“Boys, would you look at this,” a rough drawl like sandpaper and a face just as gritty made its way through the darkness. “We don’t even have to go digging today, the beskar’s waitin’ for us in a nice little pile.” 

Din was the first to draw, a hidden blaster he kept tucked under the wood of the crates you were laying on aimed directly in the man’s face. 

“Settle down now Mando,” the pirate chuckled, “you wouldn’t want to do something that’ll get your sexy little girl there in trouble.” 

Din instinctually pulled your body behind his, and you scrambled to cover your near naked skin in the drapes of wool around you. As he stood up to face the man, three more emerged behind him, and another two flanking each side after that. 

“Seriously kid, just give us the metal, we didn’t come here to hurt anybody, ‘kay?” 

“You’ll all be dead long before that ever happens.” 

“We’ve got you ten to one with your pants around your ankles,” he eyed Din up and down, “and man I wish I was joking,” he laughed again, earning a few snide chuckles from the band of pirates behind him. 

“I hope you shoot better than you count,” Din bit back, mentally noting only eight men in front of him. 

You had shimmied yourself off the cot at that point, feeling around the dimly lit dust covered floor for any given weapon where your armor had been shed and tossed to the ground— thankfully, finding the blunt edge of a blade not too far from your foot. 

“Sweetheart don’t hurt yourself, he ain’t worth it,” the chummy voice of the fucker raised your blood pressure tenfold the more he talked, “plenty of bigger dicks where you’re going.” 

“Fuck you,” you spat, whipping the blade across the mine as hard as your arm would allow it. By the skin of his teeth the shank missed the man as he ducked away, but it pierced the meaty skin in the neck of the guy behind him, killing him instantly. 

Din reacted to your kill, putting down the second, third and fourth men instantly with a quick flick and his trigger finger before the remaining men were locked and loaded on him. 

“Alright asshole, I tried to play nice,” the leader of the pack roared, turning the barrel of his blaster to you, “give me the fucking beskar or she dies, that’s the deal now.” 

“That’s not how this is gonna go,” Din growled back. You knew he was buying time, playing scenario after scenario in his head of what could happen. How he was going to manage these four pirates, sans his beskar that lay useless in a heap of dirt. If you could just get to your weapons, he could do it. 

“Oh, but I think it is.” 

The sound of robotic chirps resonated from the mouth of the cave and your eyes found Din before landing on the beady red bulbs of two battle droids making their stiff and angry debut, blasters pointed at none other than you. The way you saw it, there were only two ways out of this now; A slave to the pirating scumbags in front of you or guns blazing. You and Din both knew you’d always choose the latter. 

Before you could make a lunge for the weapons scattered on the ground, Din’s voice stopped you in your tracks, “dar ka’ra,” no, he warned, “mirdir be cuun ad’ika,” think about our child. 

You challenged him with a sharp tilt of your helmet, “Din—”

“Gedet'ye,” please. 

“Enough of the code mandos,” the coarse voice of the pirate rang out, “these droids don’t respond well to gibberish.” 

You raised your hands in surrender, keeping your helmet fixed on Din where he stood. He dropped his blaster to the ground in front of him, kicked it a short distance away. What was he playing at? The droids drew closer to you until the metallic claws of one reached out to squeeze your bicep in its grip. It twisted your arm uncomfortably behind your back and you winced in response. 

“Let her go,” Din reasoned, “you can have the armor. All of it.” 

“And that shiny dome piece,” the man pointed the blaster Din’s way, slithering close enough to him to push the barrel against his helmet. 

“All of it.” 

The pirate clicked his tongue, shaking his blaster condescendingly in your direction, before making his way toward you, “hers first, hm?” 

You rucked your arm away from the droid to no avail, feeling the deep purple of a bruise sprouting already from your effort. “Get fucked,” you cursed him as he got closer. 

“Is she this feisty in bed, kid?” You snarled under your helmet as he dragged the butt of the blaster down the crease of your chest. “Lucky man.” 

Din was on needles, never in his life having shown so much restraint. His blood running fire hot, and just the thought of this scug touching you in front of him was enough to rain death on everyone in that mine, but he couldn’t risk it, couldn’t chance that you and the child become collateral. 

The other men had shifted their focus to enjoy the view of you squirming, giving Din the chance to inch back toward his weapon unnoticed albeit at your expense. 

“Fucking piece of shit,” you hissed, feeling helpless under the trail of his blaster, making its way further down your body to the band of your panties. 

“What’s under here?” He mocked, weapon pushing beneath the elastic. 

There was no bone in your body convincing you to submit, nothing in that moment you would have changed had you been given the chance to look back, even as you wound your neck back and slung it forward, connecting your helmet with his skull hard enough to hear it crack. 

The frenzy had begun before his body hit the ground, Din lunging for his abandoned blaster and taking out two of the preoccupied men, blaster fire flying in a blaze around you both. Through the chaos you felt the droid grip loosen just enough to weasel your arm from its confines, jolting at the first sight of a weapon laying limp in the palm of the skull crushed pirate's hand. Only he wasn’t dead at all; half conscious, weak and dizzy on the floor, but not dead. 

The sound of a droid dropping to the ground behind you pulled your attention for a split second as Din blasted a hole through its center just as it took aim at you. You held his gaze and nodded in gratitude, momentarily finding peace in all the incessant madness as you watched your husband prove lethal in his element. 

It was the stab of white heat through your abdomen that brought you back to reality, a stinging syringe of pain that crept deeper and deeper until it knocked you to your knees. A wildfire spread inside you, and you looked down to see the pooling blood on your hands as you held them to your stomach, shock and adrenaline the only thing keeping you alert. 

The shot rang Din’s ears like a bomb. Helmet whipping toward the sound in time to see you collapse next to your assailant, the half dead pirate holding a blaster to your side from the heap of his own blood he laid in on the ground. Everything happened so fast. 

“No!” He bellowed as he watched you fall, the muddied chant of your name leaving his throat in shattering screams and then choked sobs as he fought his way closer to you. Snapping the neck of a final pirate in his blinding rage before shooting a hole through the head of the remaining droid. 

He kicked the blaster free from your attacker's limp hand and crushed his throat under the weight of his boot in the same breath. 

“No, no, no” he pleaded with you, dropping down beside your unmoving body and pulling you into his lap. “Talk to me ka’ra, please.” He shook you softly against him, holding a bloody hand over your pulse to feel your heartbeat, when he got no response, he shook you harder, “It’s nothing—it’s just a scratch, c’mon baby.” 

He pressed his palms into your wound, panic seeping deep into his bones when he realized the bleeding wasn’t stopping, it wasn’t going to stop. 

“Don’t — don’t leave me,” his head hung down to rest against the meat of your belly as he succumbed to a sob, feeling the universe crash around him, “Both of you, no, please don’t leave me. It’s supposed to be forever, ka’ra remember? Us and our clan, our family. Fuck, please I’m — I can’t. I can’t survive without you.” 

He knew you were gone within minutes, but he rocked you back and forth in his arms long after. Asking you to come back to him, to forgive him. “Shhh, shhh, my star, my warrior, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry,” he lulled as he held your hands in his own, unable to stop his own violently shaking body when his guttural cries ripped him open at the seams— when he finally accepted that you weren’t coming back to him. That he had lost everything in his life over and over again and that would always be the hell he was banished to. His parents, his wife, his sweet unborn child. A force around him pushing him toward eternal loneliness and solitude since he was young. 

“Fuck you!” He screamed into the dark nothingness above, beating his own chest as he yelled, “fuck you Gods! Fuck you Maker! Fuck all of you! Give her back to me!” He yelled until his voice broke and his chest heaved unsteadily, collapsing again into your body as it draped over him. There’s no one else to blame, Din. He could hear this voice in his head on a loop. You’re the only one here.

This must be some sort of eternal damnation, he thought. Repentance for crimes he committed in every life he’s lived. His cocksure attitude and naive invincibility catching up to him like a blistering burn. It was his fault. It was all his fault. Getting attached, getting greedy. He was given another crack at life when the Mandalorians saved him on Aq Vetina and he fucked it all away for inconsequential promises. You were fire, all around him from that very first night and he tried to stay away but how was he supposed to know the way a flame would burn if he never reached out to touch it. Now there was nothing left, now there was ash. 

When he finally did move, he carried you against his chest to the bed, covering your body with blankets as he gathered all your armor from its scattered places around the mine. He dressed you then, carefully putting your shirt over your head, slipping your legs into place in your pants like he had done so many times before. Redressing your tired naked body after he spent hours worshiping it between these same sheets. He fit your beskar back onto your limbs, hugging your shape perfectly as it always had. 

Din sat there beside you for what felt like hours, rotating through his stages of grief that either left him sobbing, crushed under the weight of his own guilt or cursing and wishing himself dead too. 

“We should have never waited for another life,” he finally said, trembling hands pushing your helmet up enough to reveal the plush skin of your lips. Tilting his own helmet back, he leaned down to meet your mouth with his own leaving a soft brush of his skin against yours. 

“I’ll find you again.” 

—

Mandalorians were never big on burial. In most cases mass unmarked graves were dug to let fallen warriors rest together. It was important to be buried in your armor, to protect you in your next life, so Din carried you in your beskar to the edge of the sprawling mountain range to see you rest. Overlooking the valley and river, shaded under the protection of the Torrent Wisp trees. The scorched bark left by your jetpack all those months ago just above you, and Din wept then at the memory of that day. The day that started this all. 

“Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la, ner ka’ra, not gone merely marching far away, my star,” he whispered into the wind and watched the words carry themselves away and bleed into the colors of the rising sun. 

Din never returned to the mine after that. He never even returned to the village. Ashamed to show his face to the clan that raised him to be a warrior when he couldn’t even protect the one he loved the most. The empty ship, now abandoned by the company of pirates and droids, sat idly in the deep forest and Din boarded the model Razor Crest without hesitation— leaving everything he knew behind on Concordia. 

He could go anywhere, any place, start again where nobody knew him. Taking bounty jobs for petty credits and running with militant crews where he could work out the pain of losing you through violence, the only way he knew how. This life of solitude kept him cold. And while he was stoic and feared, he was respected. He stayed busy, but it still took years before Din didn’t cry himself to sleep at night. Kept awake far too long by his own thoughts, his own vivid picture of you lifeless in his arms. 

As time passed, his loneliness manifested into burying his guilt in other women. Chasing the high you gave him inside the body of another. Able to close his eyes and see you, to pretend, to release. To have you in this sick and twisted way that left him nauseous and disgusted with himself, but he welcomed that feeling. He deserved that feeling, he thought. 

It was The Tribe on Nevarro that eventually pulled him from his decade-long violent bender. He wasn’t the same young infallible Mando anymore, even if he had yet to meet his match, but he was tired. Of fighting, of running, of merciless killing. The Mandalorian covert took him in without question on a promise he would help sustain their secrecy on the planet. Provide for the remaining Mandos in hiding. 

After the Empire fell fuel was scarce and the credits even scarcer, but the leader of the Bounty Hunters Guild, a man called Greef Karga offered him some semblance of normalcy. Do a job, earn your living. He kept to himself but it was hard to remain low key when you were as good as Din was. The best bounty hunter in the parsec, and it wasn’t even close. 

You visited him often, nearly every night in his dreams unless the spearhead of exhaustion pinned him down too heavily. Sometimes he could even hear your voice, in a bustling cantina while on a hunt, forced to fight the tightening ache in the pit of his stomach while he searched for something that wasn’t there. 

Some twenty years after your death, the image of you and your child would materialize for him in the form of something entirely different; a client on Arvala-7. And he’ll know at first glance it was you that sent him there. That this was his second chance.


End file.
